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The Human EconomyAn ongoing international project
Keith Hart
London School of Economics
27th January 2011
Keith Hart
Goldsmiths, University of London
University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban
University of Pretoria
Paris
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://thememorybank.co.uk
Open Anthropology Cooperativehttp://openanthcoop.ning.com
History of the collective project
Launched at World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, 2001
Linked to anti- and alter-globalization
What alternative principles for another kind of economy?
Need to combine theory and practice
Dictionary of the other economy
In Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian
Mainly Latin American and Francophone networks
My personal relationship to the project
African development and the informal economy
The strength of contemporary French economic sociology
Review of the Dictionnaire
A bridge to the Anglophone world
An English-French-Brazilian collaboration
University of Pretoria post-doctoral program on “the human economy”
The book
The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide
Edited by Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani
Polity Press, Cambridge, 2010
First English language version in the series
32 chapters by authors from 14 countries:
One-third translated from Dictionnaire de l’autre economie (2006)
Britain , France 6 Belgium, Switzerland, USA 3 Brazil, Canada, Germany, Norway, Peru 2Argentina, Austria, Denmark, South Africa 1
The contents
Organization by themes, not alphabetic order:
World societyEconomics with a human faceMoral politicsBeyond market and stateNew dimensions
Editorial guidelines for individual chapters
Some examples:
Alter-globalization Geoffrey PleyersFeminist economics Julie A NelsonFair trade Alfonso Cotera & Humberto OrtizThird sector Catherine AlexanderSocial money Jérôme BlancDigital commons Felix Stalder
Lessons of the twentieth century
1. Democracy in complex societies means reconciling freedom and equality
2. Both the free market and state socialism sacrificed democracy
3. Markets left uncontrolled in name of individual freedom generated huge inequality
4. Public bureaucracies practised coercion in the name of equality
5. We need markets to circulate commodities within limits....
6. ....states for redistribution and to guarantee social rights....
7. ....and the voluntary reciprocity of self-organized groups....
8. ....while extending society to a more inclusive level in the interest of humanity
What is economy?
English dictionaries: 1. Order, management 2. Efficient conservation of resources 3. Practical affairs 4. Money, wealth 5. The market
From house to market: domestic and political economy
Manorial estates, monasteries, temples and palaces extended the household principle to society (kingdom, city, nation, world)
Putting ones house in order in a world shaped increasingly by markets
Economy “pulled in two directions at once: inwards to secure local guarantees of a community’s rights and interests, and outwards to make good deficiencies of local supply by engaging more inclusively with others through the medium of money and markets”.
More to it than a choice between controlling the market in the name of society and the market as society’s sole means of development
To be published by Polity Press 18th February 2011
From the other economy to the human economy
Anti-capitalism is driven by negation and caricature
Economies are more alike than contrastive stereotypes imply
Everywhere people combine reliance on state, market, associations, family, mutuality, self-help, crime etc
Lindiwe’s life and mine....
The human economy is not a dream – it is everywhere
We need to build on what people are doing already, but with a new emphasis and direction
Why a human economy?
1. Need for a pragmatic economics that people can understand and use
2. Economy is made and remade by human beings
3. Abstraction should be replaced by a focus on complex particulars
4. More holistic conception of everyone’s needs and interests
5. Address humanity as a whole and the world society we are making
Building the human economy
We must avoid the two pitfalls of current progressive politics:
The centre-left swallows neoliberal recipes for wealth-creation while adopting slightly less restrictive social policies;
The far left wants to break with capitalism, but has no definite program for the transition.
We take our inspiration from Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi.
We conceive of social change as self-expression, as “by no means committed to revolutionary or radical alternatives, to brutal choices between two contradictory forms of society, (but which) is and will be made by a process of building new groups and institutions alongside and on top of the old ones” (Mauss).
The next stage
Feedback from taking the book’s message to the public
A new Brazilian edition of The Human Economy
The need to extend the project’s reach to Asia and Africa
Environmentalism : green markets or green vs. market?
South-South , North-South and East-West dialogue
Is the idea of the human economy central to development?
Suggestions??
